Re: [Wikitech-l] Reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

[Lukas Mezger]

You are right that our demand in bandwidth is comparably low, Ryan. But we
do have an extremely strong brand, and the power of some really great
people working and volunteering for Wikimedia. This is why I was hoping
that someone could explain the technicalities of the U.S. energy system to
me – can't we simply ask our datacenter providers to order renewable energy
for our servers, maybe for an extra charge? This is what you can do in
Europe, but I have a feeling things are not just as easy in the U.S.
Thanks,

Lukas

2016-05-16 19:40 GMT+02:00 Ryan Lane <rlan...@gmail.com>:

> On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Lukas Mezger <lukas.mez...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Yes, we're also looking into reducing the environmental impact of the
> rest
> > of the activities in the Wikimedia movement. And I am very aware that
> many
> > websites consume a lot more energy than Wikipedia does. (Please see
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact for more
> > information.)
> >
> > But this doesn't mean we should not try to have the Wikimedia servers run
> > on renewable energy. Even some big for-profit companies like Apple and
> > Yahoo are already doing this. So, how can we get there as well and what
> > would it cost us?
> >
> >
> When you're as large as Apple or Yahoo, it's easy to pressure your
> infrastructure providers to run on renewables. Wikimedia has basically no
> bargaining power because they spend very little money (because they don't
> run a lot of servers). I know Wikimedia feels huge and important, and it's
> important in a lot of ways, but when it comes to pressuring datacenter
> providers, it may as well not exist.
>
> It's possible that the only available option is to bring up new datacenters
> in areas with renewable energy, and those datacenters may not be as
> reliable, they may not be as well connected from a networking point of
> view, they may have poor security and many other issues. I wouldn't expect
> much movement towards renewables here until there's some really large
> companies pushing for this in the relevant datacenters.
>
> - Ryan
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

[Lukas Mezger]

Yes, we're also looking into reducing the environmental impact of the rest
of the activities in the Wikimedia movement. And I am very aware that many
websites consume a lot more energy than Wikipedia does. (Please see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact for more information.)

But this doesn't mean we should not try to have the Wikimedia servers run
on renewable energy. Even some big for-profit companies like Apple and
Yahoo are already doing this. So, how can we get there as well and what
would it cost us?

Thanks for your help!

Lukas

2016-05-16 9:02 GMT+02:00 John Mark Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com>:

> On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 1:42 AM, Tim Landscheidt <t...@tim-landscheidt.de>
> wrote:
> > Lukas Mezger <lukas.mez...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> With the help of Juliet Barbara and Gregory Varnum, we now have detailed
> >> public figures regarding the energy use and energy sources of the
> Wikimedia
> >> servers: As of May 2016, the servers use 222 kW, summing up to about 2
> GWh
> >> of electrical energy per year. For more information, please see
> >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact.
> >
> >> The next step would be to figure out the cost and feasibility of having
> the
> >> servers run on 100% renewable energy. I'd appreciate it if someone could
> >> help me find out how this works. As a European consumer, I can order
> >> renewable energy for my house simply by calling my energy company on the
> >> phone, with the price difference being negligible. I assume it is not
> just
> >> as easy in our case, right?
> >
> > At Hawaii consumer prices, 2 GWh equals less than
> > US-$ 800,000; that would be roughly 1 % of the Wikimedia
> > Foundation budget.  Don't you think it would be much better
> > for *actually* reducing the environmental impact to start on
> > the 99 % (or probably more like 99.5 %)?  It would certainly
> > be cheaper than paying *more* for energy.
>
> What is an energy consumption estimate of the other 99% of budget
> expenditure?
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

[Lukas Mezger]

Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list,

With the help of Juliet Barbara and Gregory Varnum, we now have detailed
public figures regarding the energy use and energy sources of the Wikimedia
servers: As of May 2016, the servers use 222 kW, summing up to about 2 GWh
of electrical energy per year. For more information, please see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact.

The next step would be to figure out the cost and feasibility of having the
servers run on 100% renewable energy. I'd appreciate it if someone could
help me find out how this works. As a European consumer, I can order
renewable energy for my house simply by calling my energy company on the
phone, with the price difference being negligible. I assume it is not just
as easy in our case, right?

Thank you,

Lukas

2016-03-31 0:47 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :

> Thanks Tim for clarifying.
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Tim Starling 
> wrote:
>
> > On 31/03/16 02:55, Katherine Maher wrote:
> > > IIRC, we included clean energy consumption as a factor in
> > > evaluating in our RFC for our choice of a backup colo a few years back
> >
> > Since I strongly support emissions reduction, on my own initiative I
> > did an analysis of expected CO2 emissions of each of the candidate
> > facilities during the selection process of the backup colo. That's
> > presumably what you're referring to.
> >
> > <
> >
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adt45Msw2o8Ml0s8S0USm9QLkW9ER3xCPkU9d2NJS4Y/edit#gid=0
> > >
> >
> > My conclusion was that codfw (the winner) was one of the worst
> > candidates for CO2 emissions. However, the price they were offering
> > was so much lower than the other candidates that I could not make a
> > rational case for removing it as an option. You could buy high-quality
> > offsets for our total emissions for much less than the price difference.
> >
> > However, this observation does require us to actually purchase said
> > offsets, if codfw is to be represented as an ethical choice, and that
> > was never done.
> >
> > codfw would not tell us their PUE, apparently because it was a
> > near-empty facility and so it would have technically been a very large
> > number. I thought it would be fair to account for marginal emissions
> > assuming a projected higher occupancy rate and entered 2.9 for them,
> > following a publication which gave that figure as an industry average.
> > It's a new facility, but it's not likely that they achieved an
> > industry-leading PUE since the climate in Dallas is not suitable for
> > evaporative cooling or "free" cooling.
> >
> > > Ops runs a tight ship, and we're a relatively small footprint in our
> > colos,
> > > so we don't necessarily have the ability to drive purchasing decisions
> > > based on scale alone.
> >
> > I think it's stretching the metaphor to call ops a "tight ship". We
> > could switch off spare servers in codfw for a substantial power
> > saving, in exchange for a ~10 minute penalty in failover time. But it
> > would probably cost a week or two of engineer time to set up suitable
> > automation for failover and periodic updates.
> >
> > Or we could have avoided a hot spare colo altogether, with smarter
> > disaster recovery plans, as I argued at the time. My idea wasn't
> > popular: Leslie Carr said she would not want to work for an
> > organisation that adopted the relaxed DR restoration time targets that
> > I advocated. And of course DR improvements were touted many times as
> > an effective use of donor funds.
> >
> > Certainly you have a point about scale. Server hardware has extremely
> > rudimentary power management -- for example when I checked a couple of
> > years ago, none of our servers supported suspend-to-RAM, and idle
> > power usage hardly differed from power usage at typical load. So the
> > only option for reducing power usage of temporarily unused servers is
> > powering off, and powering back on via out-of-band management. WMF
> > presumably has little influence with motherboard suppliers. But we
> > could at least include power management and efficiency as
> > consideratons when we evaluate new hardware purchases.
> >
> > > At the time the report came out, we started talking to Lukas about how
> we
> > > could improve our efforts at the WMF and across the movement, but we've
> > had
> > > limited bandwidth to move this forward in the Foundation (and some
> > > transitions in our Finance and Operations leadership, who were acting
> as
> > > executive sponsors). However, I think it's safe to say that we'd like
> to
> > > continue to reduce our environmental impact, and look forward to the
> > > findings of this effort.
> >
> > We could at least offset our datacentre power usage, that would be
> > cheap and effective.
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> >
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> > 

Re: [Wikitech-l] Reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

[Lukas Mezger]

Dear MZMcBride and Brion,

Thank you for your comments! Let me quickly respond to a few points.

– I have in fact already looked at previous conversations regarding the
environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement, but apparently they never
went anywhere. From my point of view, the topic leaves no room for
cynicism, looking at how easy it is to improve the current situation.

– In fact I would be grateful if you could point me to any information
about the WMF's energy use that I can understand.

– It is probably true that our absolute numbers might not be very large,
but I think we should still set an example by having the servers run on
renewable energy, by asking the board to make a strong renewable energy
commitment, and by adopting a green investment strategy for the Wikimedia
endowment.

– I have also been in a conversation with Greenpeace USA, so I can try to
answer any further questions regarding their report if needed. The report
is actually based on detailed figures that the WMF (in person of Katherin
Maher) shared with Greenpeace.

Thanks again,

Lukas / Gnom

2016-03-30 16:30 GMT+02:00 Brion Vibber <bvib...@wikimedia.org>:

> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:27 AM, Lukas Mezger <lukas.mez...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list,
> >
> > I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to
> > reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement
> > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is
> > to
> > use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main
> reason
> > for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for
> > environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.
> >
> > My project was started after Greenpeace USA published a report
> > <http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/> about the
> > energy consumption of the biggest sites on the Internet in 2015 and in
> > which Wikipedia, to my astonishment, performed poorly, receiving a "D"
> > score and only passing because of the Wikimedia Foundation's openness
> about
> > its energy consumption.
> >
>
> I don't see *anything* about energy consumption or environmental impact in
> their statistics there.
>
> They do measure the relative balance of various energy sources, but that
> means little... We could probably be burning big lumps of coal and have a
> positive environmental impact if our relative energy consumption is much
> lower than competing sites might have been, but that isn't measured in any
> way.
>
> They also measure some sort of "commitment" and "championship" of specific
> energy sources, which sounds nice but doesn't in any way measure energy
> usage or environmental impact.
>
>
> >
> > I would very much like to change that and set up a page called
> > "Environmental
> > impact <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>" on Meta.
> I
> > have already discussed the issue with a few people both from the
> Wikimedia
> > Foundation's management and from the Wikimedia community and have
> received
> > positive responses.
> >
>
> Neat!
>
> -- brion
>
>
> >
> > In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about
> > how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these
> > figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.
> >
> > Also, I am interested to learn how changing a server site's energy
> sources
> > can be carried out on the operations side since the United States energy
> > sector hasn't been completely deregulated yet.
> >
> > So, thank you very much for any comments! Maybe there also is an even
> > better forum to discuss these questions?
> >
> > Finally, if you would like to support my project, please consider adding
> > your name to this list
> > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact#Show_your_support
> >.
> > Thank you.
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Lukas Mezger / User:Gnom <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnom>
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[Wikitech-l] Reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement

[Lukas Mezger]

Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list,

I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to
reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is to
use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason
for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for
environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.

My project was started after Greenpeace USA published a report
<http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/> about the
energy consumption of the biggest sites on the Internet in 2015 and in
which Wikipedia, to my astonishment, performed poorly, receiving a "D"
score and only passing because of the Wikimedia Foundation's openness about
its energy consumption.

I would very much like to change that and set up a page called "Environmental
impact <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>" on Meta. I
have already discussed the issue with a few people both from the Wikimedia
Foundation's management and from the Wikimedia community and have received
positive responses.

In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about
how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these
figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.

Also, I am interested to learn how changing a server site's energy sources
can be carried out on the operations side since the United States energy
sector hasn't been completely deregulated yet.

So, thank you very much for any comments! Maybe there also is an even
better forum to discuss these questions?

Finally, if you would like to support my project, please consider adding
your name to this list
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact#Show_your_support>.
Thank you.
Kind regards,

Lukas Mezger / User:Gnom <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnom>
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